In medium to large enterprises, one of the critical tasks of an information technology (IT) department is to rapidly resolve technical issues experienced by users. These issues may be referred to as “incidents,” and may vary in scope from a single user being confused about how to utilize a specific software application, to a network-wide service outage impacting most or all users. Many IT departments have a semi-automated incident reporting mechanism that receives text input from a user (e.g., by way of a web page or email) that describes the problem in the user's words. An IT representative then reviews this description and uses his or her own subjective experience and judgment to determine the criticality of the incident and a potential solution. In some cases, the IT representative may perform keyword-based queries of a database in an attempt to identify similar incidents that have occurred in the past. Nonetheless, this ad-hoc approach often leads to misclassification of incidents, as well as inconsistent and slow responses thereto, as the queries lack context.